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I'm not copyright expert, but I would have imagined the answer is relatively straightforward: if an image would be infringing if drawn by a human, it's also inf

by Imnimo 4y ago

I'm not copyright expert, but I would have imagined the answer is relatively straightforward: if an image would be infringing if drawn by a human, it's also infringing if drawn by a model, and similarly for non-infringing. Does the manner in which the image is generated play into whether it infringes a copyright?

revicon 4y ago
I’m also not a copyright expert, so I wonder about things like if I draw a (crappy) picture of Spider-Man and slap it on a tshirt, can I sell it without violating copyright? I’m sure there’s established law about this kind of thing.
- eru 4y ago
  My guess is that your badly drawn Spider-Man T-shirt would violate trademark, but not copyright.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  If your shitty Spidey is a drawing you did yourself, you are not violating copyright. You are however blatantly violating Disney’s collection of trademarks on “Spider-Man”, the distinctive appearance of the character, and a host of associated marks.
kube-system 4y ago
The general consensus in the IP space (in the US at least) is to treat AI no differently than any other tool.
eru 4y ago
> Does the manner in which the image is generated play into whether it infringes a copyright? Yes, it does. Let's leave AI out for a moment. If you lock yourself into your room with no Internet access, and you draw (or write etc) something independently that just happens to look exactly like some already existing copyright-ed work, you are still not infringing any copyrights. If you produced the same work by making a copy, you would infringe copyright. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design for how that's relevant in real life. However you can infringe on patents and trademarks with independent work, ie even if you don't just make a copy.
- gibolt 4y ago
  AI isn't locked in a room. No end user can verify the sourced training images, so anything coming close to an existing work should be assumed to have been part of the source material for the derivative.
  - fxtentacle 4y ago
    Oh but you can. I've scanned the LAION training data set (which was used for mini DALLE, Imagen, and Disco Diffusion) and I recognized several images that long to business partners of mine. How does an AI know what Obama looks like? It memorized thousands of images of him, most of which were by professional photographers and, hence, copyrighted.
    - RobertoG 4y ago
      I think the problem is with the definition of copyright. It doesn't apply to the current environment. It could even be the case, that it never made sense in the first place, and only now, we are realizing. I have never seen Obama in real life. If I can draw him because I know him from copyrighted works, is my draw copyright infringement?
      - greysphere 4y ago
        Are you copying one or more of those works? If so, yes. If you aren't, then no. How do you know? Well as an artist, after thousands of hours of copying, and thousands of hours of drawing from imagination, you know which activity you are doing. As an untrained person, you might not know, but the quality/value is so low no one cares.
        RobertoG 4y ago
        But drawing from imagination is just copying from an abstraction existing in your brain. And that abstraction comes from inputs from the outside that you saw in the past, where would it come from if not that? In the Obama example it comes from copyrighted inputs. Without the photos in the magazines and newspapers I would not have idea how Obama looks. Any draw I do, it's going to be derivative of those copyrighted photos and, maybe, other inputs more generics that I saw in the past (that could be copyrighted too). How is that different from what that software is doing? It's not, it's just that it's done in an industrial scale. This is just the same problem an artisan had when factories started to appear.
jeroenhd 4y ago
> Does the manner in which the image is generated play into whether it infringes a copyright? Is taking a picture of a painting enough to violate copyright? Is a digital copy of a VHS tape a copyright violation? Is copy/pasting an image a copyright violation? A computer is not creative because it cannot think. It can only copy what others do; it doesn't understand what it's doing, only how to do something. Equating a human with a computer is unreasonable at the current state of computing and I doubt we'll see a truly conscious AI in the future. For an automated tool to replicate art into a state such that it would no longer be a mere reproduction of copyrighted material, one would assume that the tool would gain such sophistication that the tool itself should deserve copyright rather than its operators. After all, a commissioner of an art piece may provide the prompt but the art itself is under copyright by the author. We'll have to see how the courts look at these reconstructions. Personally, I believe tools like DALL-E and Copilot are no more than fancy copy/paste systems and should only be trained on copyright-free materials for their use not to be subject to copyright issues.
- xdennis 4y ago
  Copyright is a privilege granted to man. It would be ridiculous to treat tools as people.

by Imnimo 4y ago

revicon 4y ago

I’m also not a copyright expert, so I wonder about things like if I draw a (crappy) picture of Spider-Man and slap it on a tshirt, can I sell it without violating copyright? I’m sure there’s established law about this kind of thing.

eru 4y ago
My guess is that your badly drawn Spider-Man T-shirt would violate trademark, but not copyright.
egypturnash 4y ago
If your shitty Spidey is a drawing you did yourself, you are not violating copyright. You are however blatantly violating Disney’s collection of trademarks on “Spider-Man”, the distinctive appearance of the character, and a host of associated marks.

kube-system 4y ago

The general consensus in the IP space (in the US at least) is to treat AI no differently than any other tool.

eru 4y ago

> Does the manner in which the image is generated play into whether it infringes a copyright? Yes, it does. Let's leave AI out for a moment. If you lock yourself into your room with no Internet access, and you draw (or write etc) something independently that just happens to look exactly like some already existing copyright-ed work, you are still not infringing any copyrights. If you produced the same work by making a copy, you would infringe copyright. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design for how that's relevant in real life. However you can infringe on patents and trademarks with independent work, ie even if you don't just make a copy.

gibolt 4y ago
AI isn't locked in a room. No end user can verify the sourced training images, so anything coming close to an existing work should be assumed to have been part of the source material for the derivative.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Oh but you can. I've scanned the LAION training data set (which was used for mini DALLE, Imagen, and Disco Diffusion) and I recognized several images that long to business partners of mine. How does an AI know what Obama looks like? It memorized thousands of images of him, most of which were by professional photographers and, hence, copyrighted.
  - RobertoG 4y ago
    I think the problem is with the definition of copyright. It doesn't apply to the current environment. It could even be the case, that it never made sense in the first place, and only now, we are realizing. I have never seen Obama in real life. If I can draw him because I know him from copyrighted works, is my draw copyright infringement?
    - greysphere 4y ago
      Are you copying one or more of those works? If so, yes. If you aren't, then no. How do you know? Well as an artist, after thousands of hours of copying, and thousands of hours of drawing from imagination, you know which activity you are doing. As an untrained person, you might not know, but the quality/value is so low no one cares.
      - RobertoG 4y ago
        But drawing from imagination is just copying from an abstraction existing in your brain. And that abstraction comes from inputs from the outside that you saw in the past, where would it come from if not that? In the Obama example it comes from copyrighted inputs. Without the photos in the magazines and newspapers I would not have idea how Obama looks. Any draw I do, it's going to be derivative of those copyrighted photos and, maybe, other inputs more generics that I saw in the past (that could be copyrighted too). How is that different from what that software is doing? It's not, it's just that it's done in an industrial scale. This is just the same problem an artisan had when factories started to appear.

jeroenhd 4y ago

> Does the manner in which the image is generated play into whether it infringes a copyright? Is taking a picture of a painting enough to violate copyright? Is a digital copy of a VHS tape a copyright violation? Is copy/pasting an image a copyright violation? A computer is not creative because it cannot think. It can only copy what others do; it doesn't understand what it's doing, only how to do something. Equating a human with a computer is unreasonable at the current state of computing and I doubt we'll see a truly conscious AI in the future. For an automated tool to replicate art into a state such that it would no longer be a mere reproduction of copyrighted material, one would assume that the tool would gain such sophistication that the tool itself should deserve copyright rather than its operators. After all, a commissioner of an art piece may provide the prompt but the art itself is under copyright by the author. We'll have to see how the courts look at these reconstructions. Personally, I believe tools like DALL-E and Copilot are no more than fancy copy/paste systems and should only be trained on copyright-free materials for their use not to be subject to copyright issues.

xdennis 4y ago
Copyright is a privilege granted to man. It would be ridiculous to treat tools as people.